This kind of b0rkage happened often in the early days of web filtering, for example resulting in being unable to look for information on Essex, and English county. As recently as 2005, the 'Websense' filter prevented me from accessing the Scrapheap Challenge website for similar reasons. The popular "Texas Hold'em" Facebook app STILL censors "homo" regardless of what word it's in, thus preventing me from discussing lateral inhomogenities with my poker buddies.

But in this day and age, this sort of thing really shouldn't happen. It would hardly be difficult to check if an 'obscenity' is not actually part of a legitimate word. To not do so is just plain laziness.

This kind of b0rkage happened often in the early days of web filtering, for example resulting in being unable to look for information on Essex, and English county. As recently as 2005, the 'Websense' filter prevented me from accessing the Scrapheap Challenge website for similar reasons. The popular "Texas Hold'em" Facebook app STILL censors "homo" regardless of what word it's in, thus preventing me from discussing lateral inhomogenities with my poker buddies.

But in this day and age, this sort of thing really shouldn't happen. It would hardly be difficult to check if an 'obscenity' is not actually part of a legitimate word. To not do so is just plain laziness.

Yeah, but this is LiveJournal we're talking about. Their QA is awful, they can't think anything through properly, and they don't seem to care about pissing their users off or spitting on the idea of free speech if they think it'll avoid controversy or help defend against things that might spook the advertisers. (Which is probably why they rushed this through.)

LiveJournal is open-source, so I'm guessing we could look at their code to see exactly how the filtering is being done.

Even though I don't know Perl (or whatever, I'm assuming it's Perl), this code looks ugly (I can see business logic and presentation logic in the same file :o )

Nope - the actual code doesn't appear to be public. Which is unusual - although there's a lot of non-open source LiveJournal.com code (including, for a while, the only working user registration form) most of it's publicly available. The only stuff that isn't is normally things that are commercially sensitive, contain third-party code, or that they're worried about other sites stealing. I assume they didn't want people watching the changelog to find out about it...

And yes, the code is ugly, and buggy too. Unless you're using the exact same setup as LiveJournal.com (which you can't, since there are important bits of code that other sites aren't allowed to use), stuff just doesn't work. Some links and redirects end up with an extra slash on the end, the option to put journals on their own subdomains causes redirect loops, that sort of thing. Edit: oh, and it requires an old version of mod_perl running on the equally outdated Apache 1.3

Obligatory

TRWTF is that he wants to find people who are interested in the spice girls?

Anyone who is interested is the Spice Girls is quite obviously a teenage girl from 1995 who has discovered the secret of time travel. Seems like a good group of people to chat with about how dumb everyone else in the entire world is to me.